William Billingsley is one of the most celebrated names in British porcelain, a talented and influential painter and gilder, as well as a pioneering manufacturer.

At the age of sixteen in 1774 he was apprenticed to William Duesbury at the Derby Porcelain Works where his father was a flower painter. His apprenticeship ended in 1779 but it took another eleven years for him to become Derby’s principal flower painter.

While at Derby he introduced what became known as the ‘wiping out’ method of painting flowers. Only one shade of paint was used; lighter shading was obtained by wiping out with a colourless brush. The effect was much more soft and delicate than could be achieved by ‘painting up.’

William Bemrose wrote that Billingsley’s painting ‘has a fatty soft glaze look when compared with those of his contemporaries; his grouping is good and he often throws out from his bouquets long, delicately painted sprays. He also painted his flowers in truer perspective by an effective treatment of shadows; his colouring is more delicate than that of most artists …’ (Bow, Chelsea and Derby Porcelain, 1898)

 In his biography of Billingsley[i], William David John also pointed to his skill as a gilder. While independently decorating wares at Mansfield, Billingsley ‘demonstrated his remarkable gilding capabilities to the utmost often covering the whole area around his flower and landscape painting with intricate and delicate gold scroll work of the highest quality …’

In 1796 he left Derby to devote himself to a small porcelain factory at Pinxton in Derbyshire that he had recently established with two partners. The venture was a financial failure and in 1799 Billingsley left Pinxton to return to the more secure work of painting and gilding porcelain at a house in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire.

Billingsley and his family were ‘well-nigh destitute’’ according to John, who emphasises that was ‘a single, almost one-man business, with Billingsley himself executing the major proportion of every process, – securing the white porcelains, mixing and painting the designs in colour and gold, and supervising the low-temperature firing of the muffle kiln, which would probably be placed in an underground cellar or small outer building.’ Many of the blanks came from Pinxton, Derby, Coalport or the Caughley factory that John Rose had just acquired; he also painted on white Parisian porcelain of which there were still considerable quantities available in London. Cotswold Antiques has a superb dessert centrepiece potted at Coalport and decorated by Billingsley at Mansfield, probably in 1802.

For his clientele, Billingsley relied on the patronage of landed gentry who could afford the luxurious porcelain. For this, the location of Mansfied was ideally suited. Nearby was the famous ‘Dukeries,’ a district that contained the country seats of four dukes (of Norfolk, Portland, Kingston and Newcastle).

In 1803 he was lured back into attempting the manufacture of porcelain in Lincolnshire. Both ventures failed; his partner in the second was Samuel Walker, with whom Billingsley would long be associated and who later married his daughter. The business failures appear to have incurred large debts and prompted Billingsley to adopt assumed names to hide from creditors.

Billingsley and Walker found employment in 1809 at the Worcester factory of Flight, Barr & Barr. After three years developing new kilns and refining the porcelain recipe, they abruptly left Worcester, having been bound by the owners not to disclose details to a third party of a “new method of composing porcelain.” In November 1813 they set up their own factory at Nantgarw (nant-garu) in South Wales with £250 of their own money, £650 from Quaker entrepreneur William Weston Young, and smaller sums from other investors.

The agreement with Worcester did not prohibit Billingsley and Walker from using the secret formula to make soft-paste porcelain with bone ash. However, the soft paste required high temperature firing and most of the pieces – about 85% – warped or shattered in the kiln.

Lewis West Dilwyn invited them to use his Cambrian Pottery at Swansea to improve the recipe and manufacturing process. Billingsley and Walker stayed there from late 1814 to 1817, when financial losses forced Dilwyn to stop making porcelain at Swansea.

Billingsley and Walker returned to Nantgarw, where renewed efforts at production were bolstered with a further £1,100 investment from Young and another £1,000 from “ten gentlemen of the county.”

The quality of the soft-paste porcelain made at Swansea and Nantgarw rivalled that of Sèvres (which stopped making soft paste in 1804) and was in great demand among London high society. In 1816 it was reported that both Princess Mary and Princess Charlotte had ordered a “superb déjeuner set” made by the Swansea factory from Mortlock in Oxford Street, suppliers of fine porcelain to the aristocracy.

This must have been galling for John Rose, as Mortlock was also the most important dealer of porcelain from Rose’s Coalport factory. The porcelain made at Nantgarw from 1817 was of an even more superlative standard than that from Swansea.

‘Mr. Mortlock went down and entered into an engagement to purchase all that Billingsley and his son-in-law could make,’ John Randall wrote in his 1877 account of the Coalport factory.

Billingsley had become a dangerous rival whom Rose was determined to eliminate. The parlous financial condition of Billingsley and Walker provided him the perfect opportunity. “Their capital was extremely small and their porcelain expensive to produce,” Michael Messenger noted in his book on Coalport[ii].

In 1820, Rose made them an offer of employment at Coalport they could not refuse. The terms of the buyout are unclear; what is known is that Rose did not buy the Nantgarw works, which were put for sale by Young. The new proprietors did not have access to the porcelain recipe and after struggling for a couple of years, the factory closed.

What contribution, if anything, was made by Billingsley and Walker during their time at Coalport is disputed. Messenger believes that having seen off the threat, Rose had no interest in using their intellectual property to produce expensive porcelain similar to that of Swansea/Nantgarw at Coalport.

Billingsley, a restive genius of English porcelain, appears to have died a pauper in 1828. He is buried at Kemberton near Coalport under the assumed name of ‘Beeley.’

[i] William David John, William Billingsley (1758-1828): his outstanding achievements as an artist and porcelain maker (The Ceramic Book Company, 1968)

[ii] Michael Messenger, Coalport 1795-1926 (Antique Collectors’ Club, 1995)

 

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